1. Field of Art
The present invention generally relates to the field of advertising, and more specifically, to methods of identifying user-submitted digital product placement videos meriting an award by an advertiser.
2. Background of the Invention
Currently, obtaining high-quality advertisements for a product or service is an extremely costly endeavor, involving hiring professional advertising agencies and consequently requiring a large financial investment on the part of the organization commissioning the advertisement. At the same time, web-based video hosting services such as Google Video™ and YouTube™, which allow the uploading and viewing of digital videos, receive hundreds of thousands of user-contributed videos daily, which are viewed by hundreds of millions of users. Such video hosting services depend in part upon the creativity of their user base to attract increasing numbers of viewers.
Although such user-submitted videos have the potential to serve as effective product placement videos for advertisers, current video hosting services do not provide advertisers with an effective mechanism for determining which videos merit consideration as product placement videos. Although current video hosting services permit authors to label a video with a keyword (e.g., a product name), they are not capable of verifying that a given video in fact contains images corresponding to the keywords (e.g., images of the product). Nor are current video hosting services capable of quantifying the number or duration of appearances of product images. Thus, not only do current systems fail to provide an incentive for users to submit product placement videos, but they also fail to provide a reliable means for advertisers to determine which user-submitted videos are most likely to merit their attention and thereafter to reward them.